La valutazione ambientale: l’evoluzione e l’integrazione dei processi di valutazione VAS, VIA e VINCA

This paper analyses the environmental assessments (Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Assessment and Environmental Implications Assessment), as they are an important tool for assessing the effects of human actions on the environment. The study has revealed that the environmental assessments are strongly related to economics, to environmental policy and to the theory of value, and that several improvements have been conceived during the last years. These improvements concern: - the evolution of the concept of environment (from both a semantic and a legislative point of view); - the context of application of the environmental assessment (wider qualitative and quantitative ambit has been applied); - the technical-administrative procedure (which has been simplified); - the application of assessment methodologies (an integration between the environmental assessment and the multicriteria analysis has been experimented). The study has however underlined that a lot of problems remain: the most important one is to get a real integration of the enviromental assessment process into the preparation of plans, programmes and projects, and into the decision-making process.